Randomness

The ‘power’ of randomness derives from the fact that it is entirely unlimited. What after all could be more unlimited than randomness? Randomness has absolutely no limitations acting upon it and this is the only reason it can be said to be random. It obeys no rules whatsoever and this is how it gets to be ‘random’! Randomness is just another word for freedom, we might therefore say…

It’s interesting that the property of ‘being random’ is held in such low regard – only when things are non-random do we accord them any respect. If something is non-random then it serves a purpose; it contributes to some cause, like a cog in a watch-mechanism contributing to the proper working of that watch. The part is accorded value because it serves some specific end.

And yet to serve some ‘specific end’ is to be limited! To serve some specific end is to be unfree. To be non-random is to serve some specific end and to serve some specific end is to be limited, and what this means is that we value the state of ‘being limited’ over the state of beingunlimited.

Randomness – the state of being uncommitted to any particular goal, any particular outcome – is also the state of Wholeness, or Unity. Randomness doesn’t just partake in Wholeness (as it clearly does since there is no part of Wholeness which is not visited by random movement) in an essential way it is Wholeness. The random element is Everything at the very same time as being itself, as peculiar as this may sound. It is both at the same time. Randomness is the ‘joker in the pack’, in other words – it can be anything but (crucially) it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to obey the rules and is – on this account – prone to ‘going against us’ when we don’t expect it to. Randomness is the Trickster element, therefore…

Because there are no limitations, no barriers whatsoever, acting upon the random element what is to stop it being everything? What is to separate it from Wholeness? Randomness has no other commitments, it is not pledged to any other cause. Having said this, we should point out that randomness is not in any way ‘a cause’ in its own right. It’s not a cause because there is no end to be served; it’s not a cause because is no specific ‘thing’ we need to do in order to serve it. We can’t be patriotic with regards to the Big Picture; we can only be patriotic with regard to the ‘little picture’. When we drop all causes, then we partake in Wholeness. When we drop all limitations then we are indistinguishable from Wholeness – there is nothing to set us apart from it.

From what we have said so far it is clear that we do not value Wholeness, or the ‘Big Picture’. Naturally we don’t – it’s not ‘useful’, after all! It doesn’t serve any purpose. If there is some element that contributes to some goal, some specific project, then we will value it, but the thing about this is that ‘the goal’, ‘the specific project’, ‘the cause’, has itself no relationship at all to the Whole.

We know that anything which is ‘an end in itself’ has no relationship with the whole picture. That’s what makes it a goal, that’s what makes it non-random (that’s what makes it ‘specific’) – the fact that it is an end in itself, the fact that we aren’t looking beyond it. Putting all of this together we can say therefore that the reason (albeit a covert reason) the specific is of value to us is precisely because it will not lead us towards the Whole.

From a psychological point of view, this is extraordinarily interesting; it opens up a whole new way of looking at things. Why – from a psychological point of view – would we value something because it has the property of ‘isolating us from the ‘Big Picture’? Why would we have this particular ‘anti-holistic’ orientation? Why – we could ask – do we have so very little time (in fact no time) for randomness?

There is a manoeuvre going on here – a kind of a dodge’. It could be said that there exists a kind of a ‘legal loophole’ here that can be exploited. The ‘advantage’ of having a goal or cause or aim is – in psychological terms – that we have found something that we don’t need to ‘look beyond’. A goal is ‘an end in itself’ – everything points towards the goal, everything serves it, and if something doesn’t serve it then no value is ascribed to it. If something doesn’t serve the goal then it is disregarded and dismissed without any further ado.

We can think of this in terms of a shadow – a particular form of order has been projected upon the world and that order comes about because of the way in which all awareness of the whole has been excluded (just as a source of light is blocked out when something opaque is placed in front of it). The shadow is created – we might say – by ‘the Whole of Everything’ being eclipsed by a ‘false’ or ‘surrogate’ Wholeness – the false or surrogate Wholeness which is the goal.

The ‘goal’ is nothing other than ‘the self’ when it comes down to it – the goal is a reflection of the self and the self is the reflection of the goal. There’s no goal without a self and there’s no self without a goal, without an agenda, without a purpose. The goal is ‘an end in itself’ – it is something we never look beyond – and so (of course!) is the self.

If we did start to look beyond the goal (and beyond the framework of right and wrong that is created by the thinking mind) then we would at the same time be ‘looking beyond the self’! This is why the manoeuvre of never looking beyond the goal is so important to us, that is why we are always ‘subsuming all value’ within the goal – because that’s how we create the self. That’s why the self is always purposeful – because through its purposefulness it hides from Wholeness, and this is how it is able to carry on existing (in the peculiar shadowy way that it does ‘exist’).

The self always has to be busy, in other words, and the reason it always has to be busy has nothing to do with the story (the official narrative) that it continually tells itself about the goals being so very important because of this, that or the other reason – the real reason the self always has to be so busy (i.e. so very devoted to its goals) is because it wants to carry on playing the futile little game in which it is real and Wholeness isn’t….

Nick Williams works and writes in the field of mental health and is particularly interested in non-equilibrium states of consciousness, which are states of mind that cannot be validated by standardized experiments or by reference to any formal theoretical perspective.